Famed Bluenose schooner getting a rebuild but some purists call it a sham

Joan Roué is being cagey. Vague. She is not ready to answer questions. Not ready to shove her heel into the simmering debate over a Canadian icon and her family’s unique connection to it.

“There may be a news conference about it in the near future,” she says. “I pretty much have to leave it at that today.”

What is being left, at least for today, is the Bluenose II, a Nova Scotia treasure tethered by lore and a people’s love to the province’s rocky coves and sandy beaches.

Calgary has the Stampede; Prince Edward Island has Anne of Green Gables; Nova Scotia has Bluenose.

“The Bluenose is like blood in our veins in Nova Scotia,” says Al Hutchinson, a boat builder involved in the grand old dame of the great blue sea’s $15.9-million provincially funded restoration.

“Bluenose is a legacy, an icon, a sailing ambassador.”

She is a celebrity, immortalized on the back of our dime and presently parked beneath a big white tent in the Lunenburg Shipyard, awaiting finishing touches and the order to set sail.

Built in 1963, Bluenose II was effectively scrapped in the fall of 2010. A small percentage of the old boat, including the sails and masts and some of the mahogany and walnut from the hull, were saved for use in the rebuild. The bow-to-stern reconstruction had the legend at points looking more like a whale skeleton beached on the Lunenburg wharf, with her ribs exposed for all to see.

Some purists, including Ms. Roué, a great-granddaughter of William J. Roué — the naval architect responsible for designing the original Bluenose, which launched in 1921 and achieved lasting fame by hauling in massive catches on the Grand Banks and beating American schooners in ocean races — view the “restoration” tag as a semantic stretch.

They see it as a sham concealing the fact the boat being built and expected to launch this summer under the Bluenose II banner was not built according to Mr. Roué’s original designs. It is not the Bluenose II but a new boat altogether.

“There are so many differences,” says Peter Kinley, another builder attached to the project. “But the biggest difference is that it is being restored with an eye to safety, safety of the crew and passengers.

“It’s a much stronger, much heavier boat.”

The original Bluenose was made from Nova Scotia oak, while its second incarnation blended local and South American oaks.

The latest edition consists of laminated angelique, a bulletproof teak from South America. Meanwhile the engine bed, stern frame, floors and fasteners holding the whole shebang together are steel, where once they were wood.

Any boat, especially a boat named Bluenose, is more than the materials it is made of or the sum of its designs. It is a piece of living history and its identity derives from the stories attached to it and in the recollections of those that sailed aboard her, some accounted for, others lost at sea.

Men like Clement Russell Hiltz, a salty old mariner, since deceased, who was the last surviving crew member of the original Bluenose when he sat down with National Post reporter Adrian Humphreys in the summer of 2003.

The then-92-year-old spoke of a wild storm in April 1926, a devilish mess off the sandbars of Sable Island that should have sunk the schooner were a lesser captain than the legendary Angus Walters at the helm.

“Angus Walters stood lashed to that wheel for eight long hours. You think the adult population can’t pray? I assure you they can pray and they learned me how that night,” Mr. Hiltz said.

“We made a decision that when she gets stuck we’d take each other by the hand and jump overboard together. We didn’t want to be buried in sand; we wanted to die in the sea.

“But it never happened. Capt. Walters took us across the bar and saved our lives. That night, while we were in that storm, 130 men lost their lives on other ships — I lost a lot of relations, cousins and uncles — but nobody was lost on Bluenose.”

Marq de Villiers, a Governor General’s Award winner and author of The Witch in the Wind: The True Story of the Legendary Bluenose, has written about the old boat and sees the new controversy over Bluenose II — or is it 2.1? — as misplaced.

“So what if the Bluenose II is made almost all of new wood?” he says.

“Boats wear out. We have a deck out front of our place and we have to replace the planks every now and again. But it is still the same deck.”

Whether the same, or something new, or something in between, there is something fishy about the Bluenose II project. No one connected to it — not the province, which owns the boat, or the builders — can say when, exactly, the rebuild will unfurl its sails and pull away from shore.

“Soon” is all they promise. “Soon” is the new buzzword around the Lunenburg docks. And just how soon is a question only the Americans can answer. Yes. The Americans. A seafaring people who, back in the 1920s, had a fleet of fishing schooners the first Bluenose had a habit of beating in International Challenge cups.

Bluenose II, the new boat, is seeking the gold stamp of safety approval for rebuilds, a stamp belonging to the American Bureau of Shipping in Houston.

“Well, you know, there is no justice here,” says Mr. Kinley, laughing. “Whether or not there is some sort of conspiracy at the American Shipping Bureau office to slow her down and make her heavy, I don’t know.”

Buffeted by the name controversy, beholden to American standards, built with new materials, the Bluenose II sits, patiently, on the Lunenburg docks, achingly close to the open expanse of the Atlantic Ocean — where fair winds blow and fresh adventures await.